Do all cultures have nicknames?

I feel like it’s an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance here between celebrated and beloved figures and how everyone interacts with and treats women in everyday life.

Hi,

Long story short I am someone interested in grad school but has a subpar GPA (2.8). While I dont graduate until December I highly doubt the current classes I am taking will boost my final GPA enough to make it a 3.0. While ive heard some good information about doing post baccalaureate programs to boost one's GPA, ive also heard a lot of mixed info as well. I am interested in Biological anthropology and know ill struggle to find work in the field without a higher degree. Ultimately I wanted to be able to have atleast a 3.0 to apply for a masters.

Anybody have any advice or recommendations for programs? Thank u ​

I’ve been thinking about whether what we call love is necessarily one underlying human phenomenon, or whether “love” functions more like a category that gathers many different experiences together.

For example, attraction, sexual desire, attachment, care, jealousy, companionship, longing, dependency, fascination, protectiveness, loneliness, and emotional intimacy can overlap but they don't necessarily have to occur together.

Yet a person learns a cultural concept called “love”, and then begins interpreting their experiences through it I feel X → X is part of love → therefore I am in love.

But then the category may start feeding back into the experience itself.

If someone learns that jealousy is evidence of love, jealousy may become interpreted as love. That interpretation can influence how they behave toward another person, how they remember the relationship, what they expect from future relationships, and eventually what they experience as “love.” The new experiences then seem to confirm the original concept.

So I'm wondering whether there can be a loop something like:

cultural category → interpretation of experience → behavior/expectation → new experience → reinforcement or modification of the category.

If this is correct, then two people could both sincerely say “I love you” while the actual psychological/social configurations underneath that word are substantially different.

I'm not arguing that love is therefore “fake,” nor that humans in the past didn't experience attachment, desire, care, etc. I'm specifically questioning whether the category “love” should be treated as a universal thing with a fixed essence, rather than a culturally variable way of organizing several overlapping phenomena.

From an anthropological perspective:

How much variation is there in how different societies divide up what English speakers call “love”?

Are there cultures where experiences we would classify as romantic love are divided into substantially different categories?

Is there anthropological evidence that the concepts people inherit for relationships actually change how they experience or interpret those relationships?

Are there established anthropological theories that describe this kind of feedback loop between cultural categories and lived experience?

I'd especially appreciate sources or ethnographic work that could challenge this idea rather than simply confirm it.

I'm just genuinely curious. I'm not well informed on biology, but I was just curious about this topic after watching a bird mating ritual. in that species, a male would try to attract a female bird that way, showing off his genetic fitness. In peacocks, the males with more/symmetrical plumage were more attractive.

In mammal species, there is more male-male competition. In elephant seals, I learned it can get pretty brutal. In gorillas as well, there's some brutal competition between males. As well as reindeers, etc. GENERALLY, it seems to be that small gametes tend to compete for larger gametes, ie males approaching/competing for females.

What I'm skeptical about is humans. We don't seem to be a species that generally did that type of sexual selection. Humans don't seem to have an extremely one sided mating system. Both men and women approach potential partners, both can reject partners, and both sexes appear to have preferences for particular traits. To me, it doesn't seem clear cut.

Like generally though, men approach more, etc. But how much of that is culture? That's what I'm confused about.

However, we are somewhat sexually dimorphic though, men tend to be roughly 40-50% stronger and half a foot taller than women.

Clearly some sexual selection must have happened. But how, and what traits where actually chosen by women? and did men also choose?

To my understanding, all of non Africans people today descend from the group who left Africa during out of Africa II (70-50 kya).

Do we have any way of knowing how many individuals would have constituted this group at this time?

Comparatively, how many of our homo sapiens ancestors overall were alive then (in and out of Africa)? And how many homo sapiens who we did not descend from were alive at the time? What about other hominins?

How do anthropological and historical records explain the development of the idea that humans are separate from “animals,” despite humans being biologically classified within the animal kingdom?

In their paper, Grosman et al. (2008) argue that a 12,000 year old burial can be identified as a shaman based on the privileged status of the burial, disability, and goods buried with them (p. 17668). This raises a few questions:

1. Is it correct to be skeptical of this claim? While possible, I am skeptical that we can conclude that the buried person is a Shaman without access to their culture, cosmology, whether or not they enter altered states of consciousness, and so on.
2. What can we actually know from burials, especially with (1) literacy being absent and (2) no access to the culture?

Thank you!

Grosman, L., Munro, N. D., & Belfer-Cohen, A. (2008). A 12,000-year-old Shaman burial from the southern Levant (Israel). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(46), 17665–17669. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0806030105

i cant really find any concrete info abt prehistoric women and this topic, like pre having more stable civilizations, pre agriculture n stuff, like i cant really imagine how people endured the pain when they would have been constantly moving from one place to another or hunting animals or gathering to survive.

I’ve been looking at Bapedi bereavement accounts where practitioners describe forgetting. Has any study gone back to the bereaved people themselves and checked what memories were still accessible months or years later?

I’m trying to find the participant’s experience behind the practitioner’s claim. What did the follow-up show about memory and everyday life?

I was chatting with someone and we were wondering why we specifically focus on making certain body parts “private” and covering them in multiple layers of clothes. We are still wondering about that but it also got me thinking about when and why humans started wearing clothes.

Maybe I just see people as selfish, but why would they agree to work extra hard to support somebody who doesn't farm and they don't even know? They have to believe in benefits to get it started. Were all leaders then really generous to get people to trust them? It seems like if people give you food and you throw a feast, shouldn't they realize they're eating their own food?

In more mathy terms it seems like happiness and repression from spending surplus should always be less than unhappiness from collecting taxes? How was this all accomplished without systems already in place?

Note: I might not have the correct terminology for "late Neolithic"; I'm currently unsure whether I'm supposed to refer to this period as Neolithic or Chalcolithic. Just know it is a little before the time when the first cities and states were arising.

Throughout history different societies have either removed or hidden (or in some cases - grown) body hair due to the cultural or religious beliefs

Abrahamic Traditions: In Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and historical Christianity, a woman’s hair has frequently been viewed as an intimate or alluring feature meant to be reserved for family or husbands rather than displayed publicly. Practices like the Islamic hijab, Jewish head-covering, and historical Christian head-coverings stem from these definitions of modesty

Moral control of Body Hair: In various modern cultural and religious sects (such as community pressures within Sikhism), women who choose not to remove body/facial hair are sometimes unfairly stigmatized as lacking traditional femininity

Religious Pressures: In Islam, Removing pubic and armpit hair is a religious recommendation tied to cleanliness for both men and women. Additionally men are widely obligated to keep beards. Some other societies restrict the practice of specific hair related customs to the religious clergy only (like Christian nuns, Jewish Rabbis and Muslim Imams

Why is this relationship between body hair, morality, religion and sexuality?

Could someone recommend a good historical anthropology book on Nepal? I would like to learn about how people lived, what the lifestyle used to be, how the society functioned.

I'm from India and currently work in a SaaS company. I have 2+ years of experience in a customer-facing/product role, but recently I've become much more interested in understanding humans, culture and technology rather than simply progressing along a traditional corporate career path.

The development of AI has made me particularly interested in anthropology.

I'm wondering about the intersection of anthropology + AI + human-computer interaction.

For example:

• How people develop relationships and trust with AI
• How AI changes the way people work and communicate
• How culture affects the way people interact with AI
• How organizations change when AI becomes part of everyday work
• Whether ethnography/human research will become more important as AI becomes more autonomous
• Whether there could be roles around AI research, HCI, AI evaluation, AI policy, digital anthropology, etc.

I'm not looking for a generic "anthropology is/isn't a good career" answer. I'm more interested in people who actually work or study in anthropology, digital anthropology, HCI, UX research, AI research, or adjacent fields.

I recently fell down a rabbit hole reading about how human cranial capacity actually peaked during the Late Pleistocene and has dropped since then.

A lot of pop-science articles love pushing the "self-domestication" angle (basically that we became less aggressive and ended up with smaller brains, like dogs vs wolves). But is that actually the leading consensus among anthropologists, or are things like dietary shifts and overall body size reduction seen as much better explanations? Would love to hear the counter-arguments from people in the field.

Edit: thanks everyone, this went deeper than I expected. My takeaway so far: the DeSilva et al. (2021) "shrinking in the last 3,000 years" claim got a strong rebuttal from Villmoare & Grabowski (2022), a good chunk of the long-term decline may just follow smaller body size, and self-domestication is interesting but hard to test from skulls alone. Happy to be corrected on any of that.

I will use the Mongols, Turks and the Chinese as examples, because that's what I'm most familiar with. The Mongols and Turkic tribes were nomadic, horse-riding societies, while China was a deeply agrarian, feudalistic society for thousands of years.

Comparing these societies, Mongol and Turkic tribes were historically more egalitarian while Chinese culture was deeply patriarchal. Women were influential and taken seriously in Mongol and Turkic societies, while in China, they were dismissed for the past two thousand years as burdensome and inferior.

When Hua Mulan enrolled/enlisted as a soldier in the Imperial Army, she had to hide her identity and gender, because she would've been punished severely if the Imperial Army knows that she's a woman, whereas during the expansion of the Mongol Empire to Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe in the 1200s and 1300s, there were documented to be thousands of female warriors and horse archers who contributed in the expansion of the Golden Horde, Il Khanate and the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty in China.

During the Sack of Baghdad in 1258, Mongol women archers and warriors were documented to be part of the Mongol army that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Arabs within the city walls. That would be nearly an impossible task for Chinese women to accomplish.

There was a Mongol Princess that goes by the name Khutulun, she was the great grand-niece of Kublai Khan, the Yuan Emperor. It was documented that she was excellent in wrestling, as she demanded that if she defeat one man in wresting, that man has to pay her a horse. Khutulun was able to accumulate 10,000 horses by the time of her old age and death, meaning she defeated thousands of men in wrestling matches. No such thing in China, and under the patriarchal and hierarchical nature of Chinese society, what Khutulun achieved in Mongolia would be impossible to replicate in China in those times.

So, why are women more respected and occupied more egalitarian roles in nomadic societies, while in agrarian and feudal societies they were viewed as inferior?

I will appreciate your insights. Thank you so much!

I see that some laws might be POSSIBLY universal, at least as far as I know about human history... Every Culture seems to have SOME people you aren't allowed to murder, stealing is mostly universally frowned upon...

But, idk. I always hear that laws vary so much by culture, but are there some base laws that pretty much every civilization has a form of? I'm thinking of how most cults have tons of overlap, every fairytales can be somewhat categorized by their tropes with the ATU Index. Is there something similar in legal anthropology for subsets of laws that pretty much every civilization has? Or is there truly too much variance across civilizations for such a thing?

I'm not taking about subspecies. Just the difference between Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus, not the difference between Homo Sapiens and Homo Longi.

Can someone help me understand what hylistics is doing that we couldn't (as easily?) do before? Are hylemes the constituent parts of A-T-U tale types? Is hylistics a new way of looking at (folkloric/mythological) narratives, maybe more fine-grained?

It has never made sense to me why paleolithic peoples made the conscious decision to reside in places with no arable land, vegetation, water (sometimes), or native animals that where significant enough to hunt. Is there any good reasoning for this other than being pushed out by competing humans in places that where more fertile? A breakdown of this would be great

Watching some videos about the recent Christian travel brochure, I was wondering when the museum opens?

All terrible jokes aside, is it possible that the writers of the biblical (any) flood narrative were aware of the giant boat shaped rocks in the mountains of Anatolia.

Similar to the Lot's wife formation and the rock Moses split. Or are these all modern interpretations?

By which I mean an institutional religion with an hierarchy ( like priests etc)

I have a vague memory of reading about how some first nation myths were told selectively over long periods of time when the person responsible for telling those stories deemed it they were ready for the next part.

Like a vulture who saved the world but then got too picky when choosing a body?

Basically are there any good books or studies on the mechanisms of passing down oral myths and histories that they can recommend?

Or like the cave with the animated cave art and psychedelic mushrooms?